Event details

In 1961, Deborah Lipstadt (Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, Emory University)—then only 13 years old—sat transfixed in front of the television with her family as Adolf Eichmann was accused of being the chief operational officer of the Final Solution. More than 30 years later, Lipstadt found herself at the center of another highly publicized Holocaust trial, this time as a Holocaust historian accused of libel. In the Eichmann trial, survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy played a central role in convicting Eichmann. In the David Irving trial, no survivors were allowed to testify. Lipstadt will discuss these two trials, of different centuries, with vastly different protagonists, but with one common thread: the raw anti-Semitism that provided fertile ground for Eichmann’s commission of the crimes, and Irving’s later denial of those crimes.